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Well?I currently use iTunes because I'm tied to it because of my iPhone. I just realized, however, that just because I have to have iTunes to sync the computer with the iPhone, I don't *have to* listen to music on the PC using iTunes.

I also use Last.fm and their app works fine on my system except for one thing: to start, it requires an ok via UAC. Now, since it launches itself automatically as soon as I start iTunes, I have to "approve" Last.fm's launch each time I do so. Pretty annoying!

The ideal solution would be to find a player that has native Last.fm support, and while they're out there, they're not very easy to find. I know Albumplayer has native support, but that's shareware and not what I'm looking for anyway.

So, what do you use as your music player? Secondly, if you know of any players with native Last.fm support as well as Vista compatibility, let me know.

foobar is good but can be a little complex to set up to your liking. Its customizability is superior to any other music player. musikCube has a much easier and just works out of the box, much like iTunes.

I use VUPlayer -- it's small, no frills but has great sound output and has all the features I need for simple listening. It has native support for last.fm (audioscrobbler). Supports shoutcast/mp3 streams as well and has a number of visualization options, if you like that sort of thing. As you can see, though--it's a player not a manager--just a simple playlist.

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VUPlayer is a freeware multi-format audio player for Windowssupporting the following formats:

yeah, i like vlc, it seems to handle it all very wellmusic with video or just music or whatever

i have the kmplayer too and play with it somewmp is slow to load imo, and on my machineand wmp doesn't play some video/music files in my experienceon one computer it works for both but on another it doesn'tso I switched to vlc as default player

It does have very good play list management. It does not, however, support last.fm does it? -- The other qualm for me was that its primary differentiating feature (aside from playlists) is the lyrics browser. Unfortunately, thus far not a single song/artist I listen to is in the lyric database Be nice if one could configure it to use other lyric databases out there. But that's asubject for another thread

It does have very good play list management. It does not, however, support last.fm does it? -- The other qualm for me was that its primary differentiating feature (aside from playlists) is the lyrics browser. Unfortunately, thus far not a single song/artist I listen to is in the lyric database Be nice if one could configure it to use other lyric databases out there. But that's asubject for another thread

OK - It's very late on Sunday night... That means that I've got a few (or more than a few) beer in me and I'm not about to check on last.fm... But I will once I get back into the office! I'll post back - when I'm sober!

As for the lyrics thing... I've been really suprised to find some really esoteric music that I listen to in there.

If you try to search, you might just find it in there. There are well over a million in there, so there's a chance.

last.fm isn't particularly important to me, but seemed a critical matter in regards to the original post in this thread. As the poster said, there aren't that many players that support it natively -- though might be something to consider.

The other day when I was playing with it, I'd tried most of the stuff I was listening to and wasn't finding any results. (Leonard Cohen, Johnette Napolitano (new album, didn't expect to find it), The Red Paintings, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)

Edit: I like free music, definitely going to have to give them a listen

I mainly use Foobar 2000. There are many reasons why this is, but the main things that always makes the other players fall short for me is:- Replaygain is natively supported. I can't stand playing more than a few songs without this feature. WinAmp have some half-assed support for this (well it used to anyway), but it's much more difficult to use in that player + the fact that I don't like skinned interfaces.- Speed and resource usage.- Customization. I don't think there is much you can't get this player to do with some scripting or a plugin.

When I need a portable player, I prefer to fire up Billy. What other player can load all of my music library at around 10 000 files, provide me global hotkeys and still only use ~2-2 MB? If it had replaygain support, I'd probably never use anything else..though an option to read ID3 tags is nice every one in a while

Half year ago I finally understood that one can have all sorts of music video files from uTube and places like that, so I started downloading - only to realize that my beloved RealPlayer 10.5 Premium wouldn't play the FLV files. So for six months I have beeen using this and that, but ended up with K-Lite Full Codeck Pack + Media Player Classic, and KM Player. They are both the finest.

But now RealPlayer 11 has been launched (still Beta) and I am back in the fold because now it will play these common file types as well. I think RealPlayer ("Plus" / "Premium") and Windows Media Player 11 are the most userfriendly players you can have, but as long as WMP won't handle the flashes I will stick to Real.

Seems a lot of you like all-in-one solutions, meaning software that will handle playback of both audio and video content. Personally, I prefer to use specific tools for specific tasks. I'm not a fan of jack-of-all-trades solutions, in other words.

For video, my current favorite is GOM Player. It has codecs built-in and plays just about anything I throw at it. It's even better than VLC, and I've never liked VLC. It seems to be very popular in general, but I've always hated VLC's interface. I still don't understand who came up with the idea to code the progress bar the way it's implemented. Click on a spot to jump to it while playing video, and it will jump, but hardly anywhere near where you clicked. It seems to arbitrarily jump in predefined increments, so you never really know just where it will land. This has always struck me as very strange behavior, not at last because it is different from just about every other media player I've ever used.

I was a big fan of musikCube, but its development came to a halt quite a while ago and has been stuck at v1.0. I haven't checked their site in ages, but I really don't like using software that is out of development. Otherwise it would be just about the best music player I can imagine.

I've used XMPlay before and must admit that it is a very fine audio player. It's impressively light on resources, (not that I have to worry about that anymore with my new machine, heh, but it's always a plus) and quite full featured.

I like what I see with VUPlayer but have not tried it yet. It's default UI looks rather ugly, but if it will let me do the things I want to do, that's ok.

ALSong is another cool option that I've always wanted to try out. Now even more after reading the comments about the great way it implements the playlist.. but if that's the only thing to set it apart from the rest of the pack, I'm not sure that point alone will convince me of its greatness.

The whole point of trying to find an alternative here lies in the player an alternative is being sought for: iTunes. As such, solutions such as WMP11, Realplayer or WinAmp don't really make sense, seeing as how they are all big multimedia apps that are clunky and often have a "heavy" feel attached to them, just like iTunes. The ALSong, VUPlayer, Foobar, XMPlay and the other similar players seem much closer to the solution.

BTW, I've tried Foobar on multiple occasions, and while I thought the idea of making such a highly customizable player is cool, I always ditched it after a while because it forced me to do far more customizing away from the defaults than I cared for. Foobar is like Firefox. It's ok by default, but to make it great you have to customize the living crap out of it. Not a huge fan of that.. I like the product I use to be solid out of the box and to be efficient and easy to use as well as full-featured right from the start. I can't say I find Foobar fitting that bill (nor does Firefox AFAIAC).

I have read and heard a lot of good things about ALTools (ALSong and ALShow), but have so far always decided not to try them out, because I much prefer a MEDIA player rather than a music player and a video player.

So: When are ALTools gonna launch a genuine media player (ALLPlay) ??? - I cannot be the only one longing for this version!?